Back to School to What and Where

Today, across the country (and depending on where they live) five- and six-year-old children are beginning their first day of kindergarten, thus embarking on a journey that will presumably see them graduate high school in the year 2028. Later that year, we will have reached the age of 70, God willing, and we cannot begin to imagine what and where the world will be, at that time.

When we journeyed off to kindergarten in the fall of 1964, kindergarten wasn’t even offered in public schools within the Commonwealth of Virginia. One had to attend a private or parochial school for that level of pre-school. We remember learning our numbers and letters and we even remember learning to make change with play money, acting out the roles in a mock grocery store exercise, buying and selling empty boxes of oatmeal, cereal and laundry soap which we had brought from home. As amazing as it may sound today, given the difficulty some store clerks have making change from a cash register, this was a skill we were required to master in kindergarten. By the time we entered first grade the following year, it was assumed that we knew the rudiments of addition and subtraction on day one… Calculators?… Heck, we didn’t even have access to an abacus…

By the time we entered the third grade, we started to notice changes being made in our school- Gone was school prayer and reading verses from the Bible, as we had routinely done in our first two years of public school. Kindergarten was being offered for the first time in our public school, and so was “new math” a form of learning arithmetic that bedeviled students, teachers and parents alike. We remember our own parents, shouting in frustration as we showed them how we were taught to do arithmetic, in a way very foreign from the way they had learned a generation before.

At the end of our fifth grade year, Circuit Judge Robert Mehridge, whose children attended a toady private school, handed down a court ruling that ordered the consolidation of county and city schools- a decision that would force suburban students to be bussed into inner city schools, and urban kids to be bussed into suburban schools- in an ill-conceived attempt to equalize education. Ultimately, Mehridge’s decision would be overturned in a landmark Supreme Court decision, but not before its unintended effect of swelling enrollments in parochial schools and in creating a plethora of new private schools that year.

So we entered our sixth grade year attending a Catholic school, donning a uniform and for the first time- white button down shirt, navy blue tie and slacks, dress shoes, and finding out the proper protocol for addressing a nun when we were summarily slapped for addressing her as “ma’am”, instead of the more proper “Sister”… What did we know? … It wasn’t all bad, though. The football team at the school for which we played, had jerseys identical to the Baltimore Colts, and whenever we took the field for St. Bridget’s, we found ourselves caught up in a juvenile fantasy that we were playing in Memorial Stadium, rather than a tree-lined field on Cary Street in Richmond’s West End. Interestingly, St. Bridget’s was still teaching “old math”, far different from the “new math” which we had been taught in the latter years of public elementary school.

Three years later, we’d find ourselves at a Catholic military day school, which was now teaching “new math”. It doesn’t take much for one to infer the difficulty we had in mastering the idiosyncrasies of mathematics, given the back and forth means by which we were instructed over the relatively few years. After a year and one half of routinely marching tours to work off demerits, we left military school and returned to public school where, as one might have guessed, they had returned to “old math”, thus completing forever the disdain we have for math, in general…but we digress…

Even with the variety of schools we attended, and the variation of teaching methods that resulted from this variety, we learned the basics of that which was necessary to survive in an increasingly competitive and unforgiving real world- the one in which we find ourselves today- acting out an unforeseen role as a human ATM- the money comes in, and goes right back out, as we struggle day-to-day, in an effort to somehow keep ourselves afloat in a vastly changing world.

The retirement our parents enjoyed, and the standard of living they realized, will not be seen by their fourth child, but this is far from unique to this writer. Most all of his contemporaries are living a life that is one-half of an economic station below that of their parents, and his children are living a life that is a full economic station below the station of their grandparents. Then again, our parents were learning in high school much of what we learned in college, thus lending credence to the dumbing-down of educational curriculum that has been taking place during the last century. The fact that we have a Bachelor’s Degree from a large state university, and that we are nevertheless challenged by standardized eight grade testing from 1908, bears further witness to this unfortunate phenomena.

Granted, today’s youth can run circles around us when it comes to operating computers and smart phones, but this does not mean they are better educated. Rather, they have been programmed to perform technological functions thus preparing them to work in an increasingly technological world, where problem-solving has become more of a technological application and less of a cerebral function requiring retrospection and intuition. While today’s youth can cite us chapter and verse about the dogma of unsubstantiated man-made climate change which they have been force-fed, they are challenged to identify the three branches of government and are virtually unable to correctly identify the century in which the American Civil War was fought. They know even less about the concept of representative democracy, or the virtues of free-market capitalism, which can more than adequately explain why they tend to vote the way they do- but that is another topic for another day. While our parents were instilled with the value of self-sufficiency, our children are indoctrinated with a mantra which says we are all responsible for caring for one another- a textbook (forgive the term) example of how good intentions can, and do, lead to bad policy and worse sociological modeling.

It’s anybody’s guess as to what today’s kindergarteners will be taught during the next dozen years or so, or where they will eventually land, following graduation in 2028. Given the hyper-inflation of college tuitions, which is the direct result of government funding and the broad availability of student loans, and the fact that what is being taught in colleges and universities is of increasingly questionable value, our guess is that, either a) college and university education will become tuition-free; or b) far fewer students will be attending colleges and universities by the time today’s kindergarteners will graduate from high school.

It can be certain if the trend continues away from broad-based, multi-faceted education, and towards homogeneous indoctrination and technological functionality, that these children will grow up to become more functionary than intellectual, more co-dependent than independent, more orthodox and less imaginative, and it is for these reasons that we would not wish to change places with them- no, not by a long shot.

-Drew Nickell, 8 September 2015

©2015 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.